61 ft Hatt Runs Aground

[Sparky1]

Hey Bill, I don't suppose there's a chance you may have given a dock worker "the wrong line first" which lead them to untie your boat in a 4 knot current while you weren't watching is there?

ANYBODY can and will run a boat aground at some point in their lives. I only hope somebody's around to post a picture WHEN Pascal does it. You know he'd never admit it unless it was caught on film! LOL

No hard feelings Pascal, just messing with you.

[Genesis]

There are two sorts of skippers.

Those who HAVE run aground.

And those who WILL run aground.

[MikeP]

We ran aground while I was diving the boat! Anchor let loose and we didn't realize it. Depth was around 12 ft, Visibility underwater was about 12" so I didn't detect any movement until suddenly felt my knees hit mud. I surfaced thinking "what the heck?" and found I could stand on the bottom with the swim platform about even with my chest and the boat sitting against a private dock piling in somebody's back yard around 300 ft from where we had been anchored for 2 days.

Still have not figured out how the anchor let go in calm conditions after holding for two days in a fair breeze...

[Beachcomber]

He plowed this aground very hard. The port side was high enough you could see the prop out of the water. The boats owner owns a marina less than 2 miles from where he grounded the boat. The channel in this area is plenty wide, but very unforgiving if you get outside of the markers.

[Sparky1]

Not to rub salt in a wound, but if this guy was local, one would think he'd be familiar with the channel, especially at a speed that would lead to that hard a grounding. Was he running at night by chance?

Then again, this only goes to prove that one little brain fart can spell disaster for the most knowledgable of boater. I guess it's always possible that a bouy could have been out of position, but that's pretty unusual. The river is very well marked.

When I grounded my 58 in Florida a couple of years ago, I was well outside the markers in the Gulf. Unfortunately, the last big storm that had come through had changed things dramatically. Having the guy at SeaTow tell me I wasn't the first to clobber this new sandbar didn't make me feel much better, but at least I was able to refloat the boat when the tide came in.